I took a long, long break from WoW, but recently started again. In TBC and WotLK, there always was a lovely failsafe list for the starting paladins. It consisted of mostly quest rewards or craftable gear. Is this list gone? Somewhere else?

Level 90 "Heroics" are basically level 90 dungeons. Don't expect anything close to TBC style heroics. So as long as you have the ilvl 435 to queue up for Heroics, just farm your ass off in Heroics until you have (nearly) all 463 items. When you have ilvl 460, start queueing for LFR as well.

If you're lacking the ilvl for Dungeons:- Queue for the Arena of Annihilation scenario for a guaranteed ilvl 450 weapon.- Blacksmiths can craft an ilvl 450 tanking set with ilvl 463 shield. They can also craft ilvl 476 Chest and Gloves, if you have the gold for it, or ilvl 496 Chest and Gloves with Raid drop recipes and Raid drop mats. For the 476 and 496 chest and gloves, consider if you want the Tank or DPS ones, considering we love Haste now.- Engineers can craft a useful ilvl 450 trinket that can be used by non-engineers, which gives you 3 prismatic sockets (600 secondary stats each).- Farming rep through dailies with 1-2 factions allows you to buy 489 epics (496 with Operation Shieldwall or whatever the horde equivalent is called in Krasarang). You can only earn 1000 valor per week, though, and once you have decent 496 items, it's usually better to upgrade those than buy new epics.- Depending on your server population, you can also farm rare mobs (Check WoWhead or other fansites for the Glorious! achievement). Mobs in Dread Wastes drop ilvl 450 gear, and Townlong Steppes and Vale of Eternal Blossom both drop ilvl 440 IIRC.- Scenarios can drop items. (458 ilvl IIRC? I've run like 1-2 scenarios in total so far, so I'm not sure.)- You could still queue for Shado-Pan Monastery and Mogushan Palace normal in the hopes of replacing some lowbie items.- There are of course quest rewards from the end of quest chains here and there.

To get the ilvl for LFR, some of the above apply as well, in addition to simply farming your ass off in Heroics.

Thels wrote:- Blacksmiths can craft an ilvl 450 tanking set with ilvl 463 shield. They can also craft ilvl 476 Chest and Gloves, if you have the gold for it, or ilvl 496 Chest and Gloves with Raid drop recipes and Raid drop mats. For the 476 and 496 chest and gloves, consider if you want the Tank or DPS ones, considering we love Haste now.

In the end, I crafted bits of ilevel 450 pvp gear - with the new stat priorities, it was often better for tanking than the tank gear. (We like hit, expertise, haste and mastery better than parry and dodge; it's only crit we don't like and some of that can be reforged. The resilience and pvp power are off the item budget.)

Bear in mind that if you complete the final two questing zones, you'll get a number of 450 level blues, so you won't need a complete crafted set.

450 gear is really just to get you comfortable for dailies and heroic 5 mans. You'll want better to get into LFR and raiding. As Thels says, you basically want 463 drops.

Theoretically, your failsafe is JP gear, 458, which you can upgrade. However, I found JPs rather scarce this expansion, so I would advise you to save them and use them to upgrade a key piece of 463 gear down the road.

Instead of JP gear as a failsafe, consider honour gear. Tol Barad gives 800 honour for a victory+weekly quest; 500 honour for a victory. You can quickly rack up a lot of honour that way - enough for a piece or two of 458 pvp gear. I wanted a meta-gem and a cloak, so got them iirc. The honour gear is only a tad below the 463 dungeon drops but unlike them is failsafe. You can also upgrade to 466 by spending 1500 honour.

Finally run the world boss Sha of Anger each week. Loot it once and you get 476 boots via a quest. And once a week, you get a chance of tier 496 legs or gloves, plus a lot of nice 483 arena pvp gear. I would advise using a coin from your daily quests to get a double chance of a drop, as this is about the best pre-raid gear you'll find. (ok, technically, it is a world raid boss, but it's so casual - people are not screened in any pugs I've seen).

Last edited by econ21 on Sun Jan 06, 2013 5:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

I didn't mention the JP to buy gear as JP is harder to get by than VP (except it doesn't have a weekly cap), and it's so useful to upgrade your 463 gear to 471.

And yeah, I forgot about the Retri (PvP) items, which are the same ilvl as the Tank items and thus just as good for PvE, but they're also a lot cheaper to make. If you got a friend who has all the patterns, you can buy the mats off the AH for the entire set for like 40g.

I wrote the failsafe gearing guide for Cata, so I guess I'm the culprit for the lack of one now. I recently (as in during the X-mas holidays) levelled my old tankadin from 85 to 90 and ran my first 5-man hc a few days ago. That's after a year-long hiatus from anything WoW.

I'm (kind of, and rather marginally) back. I'll have a look around to see if a failsafe gearing guide is even remotely needed, and if so I'll write a shortish one up.

From what little I've seen this far the general gearing guide seems to say: "Unless it's a trinket or a shield, if it's designed for tanks you don't want it. Now go steal every strength based dps-piece you can lay your hands on!"

Given that I tanked that hc in "end-game" levelling gear (ilevel 450:ish), never received any of the hands-on information my former guildies promised me when luring me back into a tanking job, had the same guildies pull trash whenever I progressed too slowly for their taste, and saw the instance more or less whimper and die in a futile attempt to exploit my inexpert tanking; I suspect that MoP is a far, far cry from the rather harsh gearing experience we had in Cata as new level 85 tanks.

yappo wrote:From what little I've seen this far the general gearing guide seems to say: "Unless it's a trinket or a shield, if it's designed for tanks you don't want it. Now go steal every strength based dps-piece you can lay your hands on!"

That's a little too blunt.

Any piece with strength on it are "okayish" to pick up. However, on these pieces you'll find Hit, Expertise, Mastery, Dodge, Parry, Haste and Crit (But never Dodge or Parry in combination with Haste or Crit).

Pieces with only Hit/Expertise/Haste on them are awesome.

Pieces that have one of those and Mastery are still very good. You reforge the Mastery away, but the mastery you are left with is still quite useful.

Pieces that have Dodge or Parry (but not both) are also still quite good. You'll reforge the Dodge or Parry away, but even the avoidance that remains ain't entirely useless.

Pieces that have both Dodge and Parry are getting a little lackluster. You can only reforge one away, and end up with a lot of avoidance. Since Paladins don't have Shield Barrier/Death Strike, this mostly comes down to RNG.

Pieces that have Crit on it are also lackluster. You can reforge the Crit away, but a lot of it will remain, which is almost entirely useless to us.

So you want all the DPS items that have Haste, but not Crit! Items with Dodge or Parry on it (but not both) are much more useful than items with Crit on it.

One notable exception to that is the belt from the first boss in HoF. While it has crit on it, the blue socket with a 120 Exp bonus means you can get nearly a fifth of your expertise from that one item.